HOUSES AT ATHANASSIOU DIAKOU STREET

The building of Athanassiou Diakou 17, an almost heretical architectural presumption of a very recent and completely unrestrained era that gives a new dynamic to the Athenian apartment building. The architect and painter Kyriakos Krokos dared to propose an architecture interwoven with matter and light or better with his (favorite) meso light, an architecture that answers the fundamental questions about our relationship with the world around us.

The challenge of the 12-apartment building would be incredible for Krokos. Certainly, constructing an apartment building that will map the measured relationship of people with the earth and light, the basic elements of his own thinking, is not an easy task. Always working with a grid, he designs it in a P-shape, with the apartments located in the side cubic volumes and the entrance to them is made from the open, meridian gallery, which joins them. Thus, the verdant courtyard, the one that Athens and its suburbs lost in the past decades, the light that diffuses in the building even from small windows but also the open common areas with the effortless air circulation give the apartment building all its breaths.

With the supporting body and the cement bricks visible on the filling walls, the crown, the parapets and the chimneys, Krokos creates a special morphology in the building that takes off with the vivid shadows, the alternation of complete and empty, the wedges of the bricks, the distinctive zones. of aggregates. This radical morphological conception of an architecture that is constantly under construction and evolving, highlights the contrast that one material creates with the other and gives the building a sense of duration over time, so that "when it ages, it will not look like rubbish. "It will not disturb the physical order of the world," he said.

This was a translation of an original text accompanied by the photos presented here by Stavrianopoulou Sofia & George Fiorakis, from the tribute:

https://www.inexarchia.gr/story/think/uli-kai-fos-ena-ktirio-arhitektoniko-tekmirio-mias-asygkratitis-epohis-toy-arhitektona